Video: Private CEO Says Porn Piracy Is Promotion

“We will be extremely happy the more people are pirating our content and the more they look at it,” said Private Media Group (PRVT) CEO Berth Milton when I sat down with him last week to talk about the state of his industry (check out the interview embedded below). Private Media is one of the largest players in the adult entertainment space, and like many, it’s seen its traditional revenue streams in freefall in recent years. Many in the industry blame free x-rated YouTube-like sites and BitTorrent downloads for the crisis, but Milton told me that he doesn’t think it’s worth putting up much of a fight against the pirates.

“I think it’s a lost battle,” he said, adding: “I look at my own kids, because that’s the best way to know where the market is going. It doesn’t matter if I tell them that it is illegal to download. As soon as they close the door to their room, they download.”

Those aren’t exactly words you’d expect to hear from the CEO of a publicly traded multimillion dollar entertainment company like Private, and especially not from a CEO who recently called the Internet “the worst thing that’s ever happened to the adult business” in an interview with Forbes.

The business magazine talked to Milton at the end of July after Private had ousted then-CEO Ilan Bunimovitz and re-installed Milton as acting CEO, a position he had held twice before. Milton told Forbes that Private was planing to make money from “non-paying traffic,” but declined to go into details. He revealed his strategy for the first time when I interviewed him during his trip to San Francisco last week, and it’s an ambitious one:

In short, Private wants to go from making money with porn to monetize actual sexual experiences. It recently teamed up with a San Francisco-based swingers club to shoot a movie, and it wants to turn some of the lessons learned into a business, connecting people involved in alternative sexual lifestyles through exclusive websites. This will first be tested in Europe, where Private is already in negotiations with a swingers community site as well as a hotel property, but Private could eventually import it into the U.S. as well.

Milton also expressed optimism that advertisers will eventually start to embrace adult traffic, and said Private would offer adult toys and other additional products for sale. Private will make 95 to 99 percent of its revenue in these areas in five years, he predicted, adding that DVDs will be dead by then.

It’s unclear, however, how much of this agenda Milton will be able to realize in the immediate future. Xbiz reported this week that ousted CEO Ilan Bunimovitz has obtained a restraining order against Private, barring the company from certain business transactions.